Farley Mowat

(1921 - 2014)

While studying at the University of Toronto, Farley Mowat visited the Caribou Inuit and was inspired to write his debut book, People of the Deer. In response to a reviewer’s allegation that the book was “far from convincing, and very often totally erroneous,” he began work on a more rigorously documented sequel, The Desperate People. “There are now belated signs of a lightening on the somber horizon of the Canadian arctic,” he wrote, “but this may be no more than the illusion of a false sunrise in a polar winter, unless we resolutely set ourselves to expunge a damning reflection upon our own pretensions to humanity.”